Thanksgiving History Timeline Activity for Second Grade

Thanksgiving history timeline activities help students keep the story together across multiple read-alouds. When students can see the events arranged chronologically — from Plymouth, England to the first harvest — they have a structure to connect information as each book adds new details.

This is Part One of a three-part series built around a second-grade Thanksgiving social studies unit. In this post, I walk through how we built a living class timeline over five days of read-alouds, adding vocabulary and details as students encountered new information in each book. Parts Two and Three cover asking and answering questions about the timeline and describing the connections between events.

Through this unit, students learned how to create a timeline, how to describe how events are connected to each other, and how to ask and answer questions about historical events.  This has been developed into a full product that is described in this blog post.

This series of blog posts focuses on the second grade Common Core Standard that asks students to “describe the connection between a series of historical events . . . in a text.”  Over several weeks, we learned how to connect the events, but we started here with the timeline, where we recorded the events.

Thanksgiving History Timeline Activity for Second Grade

The first step was to create a timeline for our class.  I used a piece of butcher paper, drew a line down the middle, and added tick marks for each major event. 

I drew a rough outline on a black piece of paper before adding the tick marks to ensure I had enough for the events I wanted to cover over the weeks we studied Thanksgiving.  I decided we would cover 6 major events on our timeline.  

Prior to reading aloud any books, I built the timeline with students to give them some background knowledge about Thanksgiving and the events.  

Events Leading Up to the First Thanksgiving

The six events below form the backbone of the timeline. These are the events students learn about across the week of read-alouds, and the same events are covered in the printable vocabulary cards and student timeline included in the unit.

1. Plymouth, England (Fall 1620): The Pilgrims faced unfair laws in England and wanted religious freedom and a better life.
2. Setting Sail (Fall 1620): The Pilgrims sailed on the Mayflower to America — 102 passengers over 65 days.
3. Arriving in America (Winter 1620-1621): When the Pilgrims arrived in New Plymouth, it was winter. The harsh weather was difficult, and many people died.
4. Meeting Squanto (Spring 1621): Squanto, a member of the Wampanoag people, taught the Pilgrims how to survive by hunting, planting, and building shelter.
5. The Harvest (Fall 1621): The Pilgrims had a large harvest that fall.
6. The First Thanksgiving (Fall 1621): The Pilgrims and the Wampanoag celebrated together — the celebration lasted three days.

The vocabulary cards, student cut-and-paste timeline, and writing assessment for this unit are all available in the Thanksgiving History Unit.

Tell the Story of Thanksgiving.  Add to the Timeline.

Above is what the timeline looked like when students first saw it.  I then told the “story” of Thanksgiving in rough form, gave students the key details, and filled in the timeline with the printed words below.

At this point, we still hadn’t read any books or researched the topic.  

Most of my students already knew the broad outline: the Pilgrims came to America, and the Wampanoag people helped them survive. I added a few more details, like the dates, locations, names of people and objects, and why the Pilgrims left England.

Read a Lot of Books.  Add to the Timeline.

After the above storytelling, we read a lot of books. We probably read 5-6 books over the week about different aspects of the pilgrims’ journey. 

After reading a book, we added more details to the timeline in the form of handwritten papers.   While I started with some key ideas, students discovered much more in the texts we read. 

Each day we read a book, and we added more details to the timeline.

The Finished Timeline

This was the finished timeline.  It’s messier than I would like, but the students built it.  We constructed it as we went along and grew in our understanding of historical events. 

The pictures at the top of the timeline are photocopies from some of the books that we read.  I added them so students could visualize the harsh conditions and events along the timeline.

Read Aloud Books for a Historical Perspective of Thanksgiving

Since we’re focusing on events leading up to the first Thanksgiving, we read quite a few books that went deeper with the historical events rather than the holiday itself. 

Here are a few books and resources that we read throughout the week:

• Squanto’s Journey
• Thanksgiving Is
• The Pilgrim’s First Thanksgiving
• The Pilgrims of Plimoth
• The First Thanksgiving
• On the Mayflower

If you have additional Thanksgiving books you love that focus on the holiday’s history, I’d love to hear about them in the comments below.   

Ask and Answer Questions about the Timeline

One comprehension skill we focused on during this unit is Asking and Answering Questions.  To support the formal lesson later in the unit, we practiced asking and answering questions orally about the timeline each day before and after the read-aloud.

The students came up with some great questions about the timeline.  I emphasized that they couldn’t ask yes-or-no questions and that the questions had to start with who, what, where, when, why, or how.

The next blog post in the series, PART TWO, is about a routine I used to formally teach students to Ask and Answer Questions about the timeline.